April 26, 2010

Golf Finishes Sixth at Ivy Championships

The golf team closed out its season over the weekend at the Ivy League Championships, played at the famed Baltusrol Golf Club in Springfield, N.J. After posting a stellar second round team total of 295 on Saturday — putting the Red in a good position to make a run to the top in the final round on Sunday — the team shot a 312 in the final round, ultimately placing sixth out of the eight Ivy teams competing, with a team total of 915. Columbia took home the trophy with an 890, beating out runner-up Yale by three strokes. The course, which has hosted major championships on the PGA Tour in the past, not surprisingly proved to be very difficult. “The course was hard,” said junior Dan Bosse. “You could definitely tell why they’ve held major championships there. It had everything: long holes, tough greens with a lot of tricky reads, well placed bunkers … all the aspects in a course where if you miss a shot and put your ball in the wrong spot, it’s really going to cost you.” Reflecting on the season as a whole, an obvious point of focus for the Red heading into next season is finding a level of consistency from one round to the next. “I think that this season proved to us that we just need to put good rounds together because we have the talent to do it. Like this weekend we put ourselves in a great position after the second day, but were unable to close it out,” Bosse said. “We have talented players who can make the shots, it’s about gaining the confidence that we can go out and put it all together and start winning tourneys.” The only member of the 11-man roster who will not be returning in the fall is senior Robert Cronheim, who has started for the Red for all four years of his career, never missing a tournament. “Losing [Cronheim] is obviously a big loss for us,” Bosse said. “He hasn’t missed a match over his four years playing here. He’s a great player and it’s going to hurt not having him next year.” In his last tournament, Cronheim left everything he had out on the course to help his team win, just as he has throughout his career. “I fought as hard as I possibly could,” Cronheim said. “All three days I got off to horrendous starts. I hung in there and fought back with everything that I had.” Despite the loss of Cronheim, the Red will be returning with th­e majority of its team intact, now with a full year of experience playing together under its belts, giving the squad an added sense of confidence that it can go out and win tournaments. “We have a couple of good freshmen coming in, but all in all we feel confident with the guys that we have. We’re just going to go out and play our hardest. … Who knows what will happen,” Bosse said.

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Many were increasingly of the opinion that they’d all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans. — Douglas Adams